I woke up on April 2nd to discover that over 1 million people on earth had tested positive for coronavirus. "I couldn't find a website that was extrapolating the COVID-19 dataset, so I decided to build one"

It took over 4 months for COVID-19 to hit 1 million world-wide, and the graph was showing a horrifying exponential growth of cases. When I saw this, a question popped-into my head: when will it hit 2 million? (spoiler: it took only 13 days to go from 1 million to 2 million)

When will it infect 4 million? 8 million? 100 million? 1 billion? 50% of the population on Earth?

I searched-and-searched, but I couldn't find a website that was extrapolating the COVID-19 dataset daily to predict the future spread of the virus, so I decided to build one myself.

This post will describe how to route outgoing traffic in a python script running on TAILS first through Tor, then through a SOCKS proxy created with an ssh tunnel. This is helpful when you want to use the anonymizing capabilities of tor, but you need to access a website that explicitly blocks tor exit nodes (common with sites running CloudFlare on default settings).

This article describes the correct way to use pycurl over Tor, such that both DNS lookup data and HTTP(S) traffic is sent through Tor's SOCKS5 proxy.

If you google "pycurl tor", one of the first results is a stackoverflow post that describes how to configure pycurl using the pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5 setting. Indeed, even the tutorial To Russia With Love on the Tor Project's Official Website describes how to pass pycurl through Tor using the pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5 setting.

However, using pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5 will leak DNS queries associated with your HTTP requests outside of the Tor network! Instead you should use pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME.

The --socks5-hostname argument was added to libcurl v7.26.0. The pycurl.PROXYTYPE_SOCKS5_HOSTNAME argument wasn't added to pycurl until pycurl v7.19.5.1, which (at the time of writing) was less than 2 months ago!

This article will describe how to install pycurl v7.19.5.1 onto the latest version of TAILS at the time of writing, which is TAILS v1.2.3.